7-Foot NBA Center Wins eBay Auction to Name Shrimp Species

A shrimp that lives on southwest coast of Australia has a new name, thanks to an Australian graduate student, eBay and former NBA basketball player Luc Longley.

It all started when Anna McCallum, now a doctoral student at the University of Melbourne, discovered a previously unknown shrimp while working as an assistant on a research boat. Instead of naming it herself, she decided to auction the right to name the shrimp on eBay and donate the proceeds to the Australian Marine Conservation Society.

The bidding got hot and heavy with sea-life lovers like Bob Rosenberry, publisher of Shrimp News International, bidding up to $2,000. Still, the winning bid of $2,900 came as a shock.

“It was a total surprise that a basketballer would be interested in this little deep-sea shrimp,” McCallum told The Scientist.

Longley, who had participated in marine conservation efforts before, named the shrimp Lebbeus clarehanna after his 15-year-old daughter, Clare Hanna Longley.

The auction took place in March, and the description and name of the shrimp appeared in a recent issue of Zootaxa.

Surprisingly, the shrimp auction is not the first sale of a species naming right, nor the most lucrative.

One thing you can’t say for previous auctions, though: Their winning bidders did not include any 7-foot NBA champions of the tall white-guy variety that opposing fans love to hate. Longley was part of three championship Chicago Bulls teams led by Michael Jordan. And now he has a shrimp too? Hardly seems fair.